Are you really using cloud, or just renting virtual servers? The difference matters. A lot.
Socotra delivers backwards-compatible upgrades, >99.994% uptime, unparalleled performance, and the industry's lowest cloud costs at scale.
Most insurance platforms were never designed for the cloud. They were designed to operate from the insurer’s data centers. Cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud rent virtual servers that any software can install on–including legacy insurance software. Many legacy providers are doing exactly this, and calling it “cloud,” but it’s really legacy technology on a rented server.
The rented server approach allows insurers to scale down their on-prem data centers and reduce staff, but it misses most of what cloud has to offer.
Socotra champions the philosophy of small weekly updates, without impacting client deployments or their uptime. This is achieved by running one version of the system for all clients with a public library of backwards-compatible APIs.
Socotra uses Kubernetes container orchestration for rolling updates of all service workloads, resulting in weekly deployments of each new version with zero downtime. During this transition, only new transactions are directed to the updated containers, while in-process transactions continue uninterrupted on the original version. Actions such as quoting, underwriting, and document generation may literally be (and frequently are) in mid-execution at the moment of upgrade—and those actions finish, unaffected!
Vendors supporting multiple customized versions of their software must maintain multiple codebases, which divides and dilutes R&D and support resources. Even many cloud-only vendors create customized instances for individual clients, resulting in similar issues.
Socotra takes a different approach. As a true cloud-native core platform, all clients run on the exact same version. Socotra takes feature requests from all and makes customizations for none. With this approach, Socotra customers are always receiving new benefits, and are never left behind.
Socotra updates without disrupting integrations or data, so no regression testing is needed. These backwards-compatible updates are frequent and incremental, the standard approach for high-reliability platforms like Gmail, Zoom, and literally every major website—and that’s why they keep working!
Socotra’s published and highly-granular APIs serve as a contract, resulting in a uniquely stable platform insurers can trust and build upon. This approach offers the best of both worlds: insurers can innovate and differentiate without disconnecting themselves from future upgrades.
Like all modern software companies, Socotra sometimes must deprecate APIs as our platform evolves and capabilities improve. In these rare circumstances, we follow modern best practices:
In 2023 and 2024, Socotra customers upgraded 100 times while experiencing less than 60 minutes of total downtime. This industry-leading reliability is made possible by Socotra’s highly resilient cloud-native design, unique among insurance core system providers.
Socotra runs on AWS Global Infrastructure, which consists of data centers across 36 regions with three or more Availability Zones per region.
Socotra’s bulletproof design has built-in redundancy
across Availability Zones, with the option of multi-site failover across regions. Socotra customers can therefore operate without downtime, even during localized outages.
In contrast, “rented server” cloud platforms are highly fragile and subject insurers to dangerous business continuity risk.
Socotra is composed of many stateless services running redundantly across Availability Zones and automatically scaling to meet demand.
While this type of service redundancy is a standard practice among modern cloud platforms, Socotra is the only insurance core system that offers it. This approach allows Socotra to deliver the highest reliability and performance in the industry.
Socotra employs an Active/Active recovery type across data centers, supporting automatic failover and load balancing, which further ensures high availability and resilience.
This design supports robust disaster recovery capabilities, such as a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 5 minutes for single Availability Zone disruptions, with options for enhanced resilience in multi-region scenarios.
Finally, Socotra’s backup strategy includes monthly automated restoration tests, because as seasoned CIOs like to say: “If your disaster recovery strategy isn’t tested regularly, then you don’t have a disaster recovery strategy.”
Socotra runs at a minimum “n+1” baseline, where n is the minimum to serve the current workload, and n+1 provides resiliency in case of outages and continued performance during sudden spikes.
When the load increases, we use horizontal autoscaling to increase per-service capacity, and cluster node autoscaling to provide additional compute instances on-demand. When the load reduces, these resources are automatically scaled back to nominal n+1 redundancy levels.
Many insurers have migrated to “rented cloud” technologies only to find it’s more expensive than their previous data centers–often many millions of dollars per year!
In contrast, Socotra achieved industry-leading performance results with an AWS cost of less than $300 per day, highlighting the efficient design of Socotra’s mature cloud architecture. The aforementioned autoscaling capability not only helps it meet demand peaks, but also scales down to save costs.
Socotra offers insurers two types of deployments:
Shared environment – Socotra clients have the option of licensing individual tenants from a shared environment. This option provides all of Socotra capabilities, at a lower cost to the insurer.
Dedicated environment – Socotra clients can opt for exclusive access to the entire cloud environment in which their own unlimited-tenant Socotra instance resides.
Whatever you choose, you will have the complete functionality Socotra offers, continually updated to keep you current.
“Socotra creates a foundation to improve our service and, in turn, our customer and broker experiences, and it will also help improve our agility in reacting to changing market trends. Their core technology is more advanced than other options we evaluated in the marketplace for our digital-focused initiative.”
“Our ratings, document generation, underwriting, policy issuance and invoices – everything is in Socotra. In only 6 months we went live in five states with Socotra earning premium out of the gate. With some other vendors, you just have a team formed in 6 months.”
“Players Health is one of the first MGAs to allow brokers to place sports and fitness business through a user-friendly digital portal. This digital-first approach is only possible with the combination of BizDynamics’ digital engagement platform and Socotra, which made it fast and easy to launch our unique sports insurance product.”
